Assistant Professor of Communications Joni Siani brings years of experience to campus from the media industry and uses those industry experiences to improve the world as an advocate for social media literacy.
In her third year at Lasell, Siani was previously at Manhattanville College in New York City for four years prior.
“So out of nowhere, Manhattanville College called me and said, ‘I heard you were available. Would you want to teach in New York?’ I could do it for a year. That turned into four years,” Siani said.
With the commute every week becoming too time-consuming for Siani, she was ready for a shift back to the Boston area to focus on documentary filmmaking when Meryl Perlson, chair of communications, reached out and asked if Siani wanted to teach a few classes at Lasell.
Siani was originally going to make a film about communicating for intimacy, stemming from a class she taught at Manhattanville for the Gen-Z population in the digital age before she shifted her focus to analyzing online harm groups instead.
“I was asked to do a podcast to highlight some of these parents whose kids died because of online harms. And I thought I was just gonna do the elevating of their messaging,” Siani said. “Then that turned into my advocacy work and working with the kid’s online safety act as part of the legislation and these families that were dealing with kids who are extorted, nobody knows these stories.”
Siani did have prior experience in dealing with the repercussions of social media, as she collaborated with her students to make a documentary and movie titled “Celling Your Soul” in 2012. Siani felt that this was an important movie to make for students.
“I was seeing the warning signs in front of me. I was dealing sometimes with three hours of Facebook therapy in class, and so I asked one simple question. I said, ‘If this is how you feel with it, how would you feel without it?’” Siani said. “This was a social science experiment, we didn’t know what we were gonna find out. Every student ended up saying, ‘Oh my God, my relationships were better, I feel better, I’m sleeping better. So they said to me, our lives changed,” Siani said.
Siani and her students decided to take the findings from the social experiment and make a video for a class final project for a class. They then ended up putting a film together and the students submitted the completed movie to film festivals to get more eyes on their work.
“Then we kept winning. But at the time I had no clearance, I had all these celebrities in the film. And then because we kept winning, we had an opportunity for a distribution deal, and then we got a distribution deal,” Siani said.
Siani’s higher education journey wasn’t linear, as she did not attend college until her thirties. “So I left my little home in Staten Island at 18 years old. I thought I just wanted to get into media, so I literally went to Florida, opened up a phone book, and started calling radio and TV stations,” Siani said.
“When people would go like, ‘Well, just get your foot in the door, like any little station,’ but [with] my ignorance is bliss mentality, I thought, ‘If I get my foot in the door at the number one station, then I don’t have to crawl to the top,’” Siani said.
At 18 years old, Siani got a job at the number one music station in Miami. Within a couple of years, she was on the air as a broadcaster and the music director. She was also the entertainment reporter for the Miami station which landed her a recurring role on the TV series “Miami Vice.”
Siani also worked for five radio stations in five years in five different cities including stations in Miami, Dallas, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston before deciding she was ready to settle down.
“So I went back to school and then I started teaching some radio and television production classes because I didn’t have to have the big master’s degree at that time because I was an industry person. And then I fell in love with it,” she said. “I do love teaching, my thing is I try to listen and learn from students. Students are the pulse. I wouldn’t have done this movie, I wouldn’t have written a book,” Siani said.
Siani continues to advocate for social media literacy with her company “No App For Life,” which is a resource on how social media is affecting generations socially and mentally. Siani is also continuing to direct as she is working on her next film about Big Tech’s hold on society, and how society can correct our social media use in the digital age. Siani also hosts a weekly show WBZ Newsradio 1030 on Saturday evenings.
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